Yesterday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced a series of changes to Department of Justice (DOJ) policy that clarified DOJ’s expectations for cooperation in investigations of corporate wrongdoing. The changes are sensible and should be welcomed by the business community as an improvement over the prior policy, commonly known as the Yates Memo. As Rosenstein noted, the changes are intended to recognize how the Yates Memo has been applied on the ground, at least…

This post recently appeared in Law360, available for subscribers here. Anyone practicing in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission enforcement arena should sit up and take notice of the recent developments in the Footprint case at FERC. The most public step in an enforcement procedure before FERC is the issuance of an order to show cause, or OSC, by the commission. An OSC is FERC’s formal announcement that its Office of Enforcement, or OE, staff…

This post recently appeared in our sister publication, Consumer FinSights. In its recently published Fall 2018 Rulemaking Agenda, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection announced that it is considering future rulemaking activity regarding the requirements of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (“ECOA”) – specifically, “concerning the disparate impact doctrine in light of recent Supreme Court case law and the Congressional disapproval of a prior Bureau bulletin concerning indirect auto lender compliance with ECOA…

This post originally appeared on our sister publication Consumer FinSights On September 30, 2018, California enacted the nation’s first small business truth-in-lending law when Governor Jerry Brown signed into law SB 1235. The law aims to protect small businesses from predatory lending practices by requiring increased transparency of certain business-purpose loans marketed to small businesses. SB 1235 draws comparisons to the federal Truth in Lending Act, which imposes disclosure requirements for consumer-purpose, but not…

In the latest sign of regulatory scrutiny of asset-advance companies offering consumers what regulators believe are in fact regulated “credit” under federal law and “loans” under state law, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP) filed its first new lawsuit under Acting Director Mulvaney last Thursday. The complaint, filed in the Central District of California, alleges that a so-called pension-advance company, Future Income Payments, LLC, its President and affiliates falsely marketed high-interest loans as mere…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit narrowed the reach of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA” or “the Act”) in ruling that the government cannot use aiding and abetting or conspiracy statutes to charge a defendant with violating the FCPA if the defendant is not in the category of persons directly covered by the Act. Defendant Lawrence Hoskins, a UK citizen, worked for a UK subsidiary of Alstom S.A. The government alleged…

Imagine an individual who is convicted of fraudulently obtaining $5,000 but simultaneously acquitted by a jury of conspiring to fraudulently obtain $1 million. Yet at sentencing, the court bases its sentence of the defendant not on the $5,000 fraud of which he was convicted but on the $1 million conspiracy for which the judge finds him culpable. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, the dollar amount of a fraud or theft is a primary determinant of…